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Prank Toys
Fake screens, fake alerts and gag generators. Aim them at friends rather than strangers and nobody gets hurt.
14 sites
Lorem ipsum made entirely of cured meats, for mock-ups where nobody was going to read the filler text anyway.
- <1 min
A free endpoint that returns one cat fact per request, which is how every cat-facts prank bot ever built gets built.
- 2 min
Sugar-coated filler text for wireframes, with sliders for exactly how sweet and how long the nonsense should be.
- <1 min
An interface that forbids clicking entirely and makes you navigate by hovering, which is far stranger than it sounds.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Full-screen fake update screens for every operating system, including the blue one, with a bar that never finishes.
- <1 min
- Desktop
Placeholder text made of artisanal nonsense, optionally cut with real Latin for clients who prefer not to notice.
- <1 min
Mocks up a screenshot of a conversation that never happened, for jokes and design mock-ups rather than anything serious.
- 2 min
Turns a question into a link that mimes typing it into a search box, for colleagues who never quite learn.
- <1 min
Mockly
AltFBuild a convincing fake post, chat or notification for a joke or a mockup. Watermarked so nobody mistakes it for the real thing.
- 10 min
The link at the end of every bait-and-switch since 2007, and the reason nobody fully trusts a shortened URL.
- <1 min
- Sound on
A shelf of harmless fake screens — cracked display, virus alert, retro desktop — meant for a colleague's unattended laptop.
- 2 min
- Desktop
An air horn in a browser tab, installable offline, built by Google engineers as a demo and adopted as a weapon.
- <1 min
- Sound on
Spawns browser windows that dance around the screen and refuse to sit still, harmless but genuinely infuriating.
- 2 min
- Sound on
- Desktop
A small publisher of deliberately pointless web projects, including several gag sites you have probably been sent.
- 10 min
How we picked these
Every entry in Detour is hand-sorted rather than scraped: filed under one category, given one to three moods, and placed in a time band for how quickly it pays off. The practical facts — cost, sign-up, sound, device and whether it is safe at a desk — are recorded per site and shown on every card, so you can rule things out before you click.
Prank Toys: questions
How many sites are in Prank Toys?
14 sites, each hand-sorted by category, mood and how long it takes to pay off. 1 of them is an AltF original that run right here.
Which of these sites are free with no sign-up?
14 of the 14 are free and need no account. None of them are paid.
Do these sites work on a phone, and are they safe for work?
10 of 14 work on a phone; the rest are desktop only. 14 are safe for work and 11 work with the sound off.